As he demonstrates in The Bitch, director Guillermo Brown ain't no hack, even if his propensity for new ideas doesn't always pay dividends.

Nonetheless, that sometimes fertile imagination of his is arguably more interesting than this comedy's fairly undistinguished, middle-of-the-road sex.

Though the plotting is pretty muddled, we were able to derive at least this much: Asia Carrera plays a gun-packing, punch-throwing con artist who, using her more than obvious physical attributes, manipulates dim-witted, pot-smoking Vince Vouyer into helping her steal some sort of computer disk.

Offsetting the incoherent storytelling, though, are those fresh directorial touches such as wry multiple takes -- each slightly different content-wise -- of the same shot, Brown's choice of soundtrack music (when's the last time a fuck scene set in the present was scored with 1940s big band music?) and the way he reveals the relationships between the characters in nonlinear, Tarantino-esque fashion.

Alas, said stylings aren't always successful, such as when Brown continually cross cuts between two copulating couples -- one inside, shot on video; the other outside, shot on film -- using the same exact camera setups for each.  As visually intriguing as that is, the actual sex seems to take a back seat to the director's affinity for his own technique.

And viewers are likely to be frustrated by Brown leaving the second couple -- Randy Spears and some big-titted redhead -- hanging in mid-thrust to cut to several dialogue sequences. Only after a fair amount of chattering does he come back to the pair for the much delayed denouncement.  Talk about your coitus interruptus.

Taken as a whole, in fact, the film's sex -- largely boy/girl one-on-ones -- while decently energized, just isn't all that hot.